Hey everyone!

I apologize for the delay in this update. The past several months have been... Well, overwhelming, but in good ways. I could list all things I did (it's a bit intimidating of a list looking back at it!), but here are the most pertinent to Catharsis:

• We're almost finished with our art! We have 1-2 more pieces to go, then we'll be assembling the art book, creating the Duo Powers cards for final printing (remember—these will be sent externally to the base game, but there is space in the insert for them), and get your orders for the mats and t-shirts. Our artist in China is hard at work on the last images even now. (Well, not right this moment as in when I'm typing this—it's the middle of the night for him. But once he wakes up, he's back at it!)

• Art and I demoed Catharsis at Gen Con. My cousin (Hey, Chris!) very kindly signed up to run 10 demo sessions of the game. Wanting him to be able to enjoy the convention, Art and I ended up running or helping out with 9 of them. The end result: Everyone loved the game! Some of my personal highlights:

—>The player who said, "I've seen all the kinds of cooperative design before," then played Briggs. He was gushing about how cool and inventive the design is for 10 minutes afterwards!

—>The husband and wife who said they never get to play truly cooperative games with other people, so they really wanted a game that played well with just them 2. The husband likes to play support and the wife likes to play bruisers, so they played Leme and Unmei, respectively. I gave them the Horrific Mass deck, and they had a huge blast and said they couldn't wait to get the final version of the game!

—>All the people who said they wanted to buy the game, and then we had 5 pre-orders before the end of the con. Considering we ran 10 sessions of the game, that's an incredible rate of success!

—>I spent I don't know how many hours going over every single card, cleaning up the language, correcting several typos (gah!), and—and bear with me on this—changing Séalaithe and Tenzin's powers. (More on that below.)

• Shipping and Production: While at Gen Con, we met with representatives from the factory. They brought two copies of the new insert. Art and I went over every inch of that new insert, and we can confirm that it's all incredibly solid and sturdy. So, the first payment is in their hands, their factory is getting all the tooling ready, and production will be fully underway shortly! They estimate that between manufacturing and shipping, you should receive the games around the end of November. Both the factory and Art made me promise that I qualify this with *barring any external factors*, since the craziness of the world has impacted that so much. 
• Finally, we signed up to have a booth at PAX Unplugged! If you're at the convention, we'd love to see you there! (I'll talk more about this during a later post. Convention setup and layout is way more complex than I first thought...)

So let's talk about shipping. I mentioned before than we'd need to increase the price on this due to all the factors raising rates, and here are the final numbers:

If you are in the USA:

—$10 for normal shipping

—$60 for direct shipping from the factory

If you are in the EU:

—$20 for normal shipping 

—$50 for direct shipping from the factory

Why the EU is cheaper than the US on the direct shipping but not the normal shipping, I'm not sure, but we verified this multiple times with the factory. Direct shipping means you don't have to wait for the boat—you get your game several months early! Otherwise, with normal shipping, you'll get the game in the late November/early December time frame.

When we send out the survey for which mats, t-shirts, etc. you want and confirm your mailing address is when we'll ask you for which shipping you want and collect the payments. 

I'm going to keep this update short (well, for me at least) because this semester, I'm teaching 7 classes. The typical student here takes 5 classes. So this is going to be a very interesting experience for me. I just view it as 7 opportunities to talk about Catharsis...

Until next time, may the rulebooks you read be clearly organized and laid out!

Dave